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Courtney Dillard of Five Star Automotive adds fluid. UGA students and faculty were invited to get their bikes or cars checked out by experts for free Tuesday as part of Operation SafeDrive at the Tate Student Center on Nov. 15, 2011.

Education reporter

Mechanics checked out hundreds of bikes, cars and trucks for University of Georgia students and workers Tuesday, trying to make sure they’ll be safe on the drive back home for Thanksgiving break or the ride back to their dorms on Baxter Street.

The mechanics did find a few potentially serious problems during their free inspections, as they peered under hood after hood outside the Tate Student Center, said Don Walter, head of UGA Parking Services. The UGA department sponsors the annual “SafeDrive” event with the help of mechanics from UGA Campus Transit, Five Star Automotive and, for the first time this year, two Athens bike shops.

One driver’s car had a cracked radiator, which could have led to an engine meltdown out on the road.

Another driver had a broken latch under the hood, which could have flown up and smashed into the windshield at highway speed.

But the mechanics’ work mostly was routine — topping off oil, antifreeze and other fluids and making sure tires were inflated to the right pressure.

The mechanics also became teachers for students, some of whom literally never had looked under their cars’ hoods.

“I don’t know how to pop the hood,” one young student sheepishly confessed to Five Star Automotive mechanic Courtney Dillard.

Dillard found the latch for her, showed her where it was and, a few minutes later, pronounced her good to go.

“There’s nothing wrong with it? Oh, wow,” said the grateful young woman, delighted. Back home in Missouri, the mechanics always seem to find something wrong, she said.

This was the first time mechanics from local bike shops also were on hand to do bike safety inspections, and organizers said they were pleasantly surprised at the volume of bike riders Tuesday.

Sunshine Cycles owner Jimmy Marbut took the first shift, followed by Micah Morlock of Georgia Cycle Sport; Marbut already had inspected and performed minor tune-ups on nearly 50 bicycles by 11:30 a.m., an hour and a half into the SafeDrive event.

“It’s mostly flat tires and rusty chains,” Marbut said, but like the auto mechanics, he had found some dangerous problems as well. One young woman’s bicycle wheel was at risk of collapsing because of missing spokes.

The big demand for bike inspections surprised both Walter and Jennifer Dunlop of UGA’s Office of Sustainability, which sponsored the bike inspections.

She said she’ll try to find more opportunities for the sustainability office to piggyback on events sponsored by older, more established campus units, she said.